Snowboarding Whistler’s Train Wreck

When I first moved to Whistler I was asking around about cool places to go and take photos of. I hear a lot about Lost lake and Meadow Park, but someone told me about the Train Wreck. This really intrigued me because when I lived back in Nova Scotia I had started a series on Abandoned and Desolate places and buildings. so this fit perfectly.

The train wreck was turned into a mountain biking trail with ladder bridges, gaps and drops. I tried to convince one of my friends to go shoot some mountain bike photos there but when he saw the condition of the trail he wasn’t too stoked on riding it. At the time the trail was poorly maintained and to this day I don’t believe it has received much care.

That winter season I was scarping for some original ideas for shooting snowboarding. I had an idea of a grind on the train over one of the open carriage doors. I finally got a crew together to shoot at the train wreck and we started building the idea I had.

The benefit of having a bunch of riders there was that we had plenty of hands to build, but the riders who weren’t building where exploring.

Once we finished building the feature grind over the carriage door Nev did a few speed checks and declared that there wasn’t enough speed to do what we where hoping was possible. Luckily Ryan had spotted a little gap step down that we could sling shot riders into.

So I snapped a few photos of Ryan doing some huge grabs over the step down when Nev decided to do a frontside 180 grab over the feature. Pretty stoked on the shots I was able to get showing the wreckage of the trains and all the grafitti thats been sprayed all over them.

After the riders where finished with the step down Nev wanted to do some bomb drops off one of the trains so we build a little bit of a landing on the bottom of one of the trains and I set up some flashes to get the shot. Everyone was having fun, while Nev and Ryan where strapping in to bomb drop the trail, Jai and Courtney where posing for some portraits.

Nev was throwing some nice one footed grab bomb drops off one of the colourful spray paints trains. This shot took me the longed to get due to Nev wearing a black shirt under his green jersey. I had to reposition my flashes to throw more light onto his arms so that they would stand out from the black back ground. Eventually I got the settings dialed in and we got the shot.

Before we left Jai decided to back flip off the train and it was a great addition to a fun night at the train wreck.

If you have a chance when your in Whistler take a 15minute hike from Function Junction down south down the train tracks and take a look around the train wreck, it’s an interesting park of Whistler that a lot of tourist don’t get to see.

If you enjoyed this post you’ll enjoy my other post about Snowboard Jibs – Sliding Red Rails – Curved Wall Ride – Blackcomb Black Park Tamedog – Kaedonwood Rail drop – Whistler Rail Jib – Blackcomb Barrel Jib